The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

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  1. Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public
    I’ve been reading Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public (2018) and sent a review of the book to a group of friends on the Left and Right that I’ve been talking to and corresponding with (see below).Gurri claims that with the advent of the internet and social media we’ve entered what he calls the Fifth Wave of information technology, which has revolutionized and democratized the public’s access to information. As a result, both authoritarian and liberal democracies have become threatened, as the hierarchical, top-down flow of information has become disrupted and led to a crisis in authority. He uses as examples the Arab Spring in 2011, which deposed the government in Tunesia and Mubarak’s three-decade rule in Egypt. He uses many other examples such as the indignados revolt in Spain, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and eventually Brexit and Trump. While the book was published in 2014, an addition, “Reconsiderations: Trump, Brexit, and Farewell to All That” was added in 2018. Gurri was a former CIA analyst and approaches this work from an analytic perspective with very little bias, critical of both Obama and Trump.What I believe to be the main insight and take away from Gurri’s book is that it offers a framework to understand our current situation. He favors neither the public, which is in revolt but hasn’t been able to govern, or the status quo elite, still stuck in what he calls an industrial age mindset or paradigm and feeling threatened by the public’s access to information. He uses the work of Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky (Risk and Culture: An Essay of Technological and Environmental Dangers, 1985) as a model to describe these changes: The Center refers to a continuation of the status quo and its protection, while the Border refers to the public or networks, which are voluntary associations of equals. It’s a theme that recurs throughout the book and sheds light on the current efforts of governments to censor the opposition.Another thing I appreciate about Gurri is the distinction he makes between rhetoric and behavior. Trump basically exemplifies the over-the-top, combative rhetoric of the public/internet sphere, while his actual policies were typically Republican with the exception increased protectionism for American business and decreased interventionism in foreign policy (my opinion). He also sees the opposition response (Democratic media and NeverTrumper) to Trump as hysterical and over-the-top as well.A question came up from one of the group about Gurri’s thoughts about the future, I responded:Gurri makes it clear that he’s not a prognosticator or prophet; he’s an analyst describing what he sees. But on our present course what he basically sees is no resolution to the elite vs. public dynamic: In his examples, the public usually has no theory or method of governance and the elite is weak, paralyzed, and feeling threatened. The details of course change somewhat from country to country with different cultures and traditions. He does caution about the threat of nihilism as demonstrated in the wanton destruction and killing in mass murders and the terrorist state of ISIS, with one possible solution being more “localism” as exemplified by Switzerland and the digitized government of Estonia, though the latter “lies beyond the reach of gargantuan-sized national bureaucracies.” Lastly, he calls for the need of a new elite selected by the public and characterized by integrity, honesty and humility with reduced distance between the government and the governed. This is his hope to restore the public’s faith in the democratic republican form of government. He ends the book in 2018 so the Mueller and Durham reports haven’t been revealed, COVID hasn’t happened, and the 2020 Election and Jan. 6th haven’t occurred. Gurri like many others has been influenced by Nicholas Nassim Taleb so there remains the possibility (maybe inevitability) of another Black Swan event like 9/11 or the 2007-08 market crash.

  2. A strange book to read right now in 2021 – but an important one
    “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium” by Martin Gurri was first published in 2014, and then the author added a rather extensive chapter entitled “Reconsiderations” in 2018. The addition didn’t revise or change anything from the 2014 book; it simply updated the information with the events of 2016 and after. And it is a very compelling, and disturbing, book to read in the first quarter of 2021.A former CIA analyst specializing in global politics and global media, Gurri’s thesis is relatively simple: that the age of information has seriously undercut traditional elites and hierarchies, to the point where trust and credibility by the public are gone. He delves into example after example – the Arab Spring of 2011, the presidency of Barack Obama, whose election repudiated the traditional elites in the Democratic Party (as Barnie Sanders almost did in 2016); Brexit, there the British public turned a deaf ear to the elites in government, academia, business, culture, and the media; the election of Donald Trump, which repudiated both the Democratic Party and the traditional elites of the Republican Party.Over and over again the public, armed with the staggering amount of information available on the internet, questions, rejects, repudiates, cancels, and ignores the traditional authorities created during the industrial age. Information networks and hubs have replaced hierarchal authority and experts. The problem is that networks can’t govern a nation state or even a region. But neither can the former authorities who longer have the consent of the governed.What Gurri is arguing certainly helps explain the paralysis that has characterized government in Washington, D.C. Politics increasingly exemplifies paralysis. People in political parties no longer trust anyone in the other party; they often don’t trust people in their own. This idea of trust is critical. Resolution will only come when the public settles on new elites to govern, and that is a process that may take generations.To be clear, Gurri is not talking about the public as the mob taking over parts of Seattle, rioting and burning in Minneapolis, or invading the U.S. Capitol. (In fact, he finds fault with a news media constantly amplifying tiny groups of people as representative of larger crowds.) No, the public is us, the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs. The age of information has taught us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and increasingly think of opposing views as those of the enemy.And, he says, we may be floundering for a while. It’s really strange to be reading Gurri as he talks about the worst thing that threatened elites can do – repression – and see exactly that happening on the internet, in the news media, and leading American progressives talking about the need for re-education camps.Gurri makes it very clear that he is anything but a supporter of Donald Trump. But he understands what gave rise to Trump and his predecessor, what created Brexit, what’s tearing at the fabric of the European Union, and what continues to create strife in the Western democracies. “The Revolt of the Public” is not an easy read, but it’s an important one for understanding the times we’re living in.

  3. I know, you’ve heard hundreds of times that the Internet changed everything. But did you really dig what this means? Here you will find some really astonishing insights about the impact of the “fifth wave” on the relation between the networked public and the authority, and how this can affect democracy, capitalism, science. Everything.

  4. A detailed, yet thoroughly absorbing read. An insight into how the modern machinery of Global finance and politics works – or not!

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